Need Help! Electricity went out in an entire wall shared by two rooms.

I am new to this community and a new homeowner. I am ready to start attempting to do it myself so I signed up. All the electrical outlets and the light switches in one wall that is shared by two rooms went out. I have 4 separate breaker boxes in my house and assumed it was the closest one but when I flipped all of them off and then back on nothing happened. So I did the same thing to all the other breaker boxes and none of them turned the power to that wall back on. I am not particularly fond of electricity so I do not normally deal with it, but my veteran status trumps my fear so please help me figure this out! If possible list steps to take,

Thanks
JW

 

JW, welcome to the forums! You'll find we ask as many questions as you do, so here goes. How old is the house? Are any of the rooms near a bathroom or kitchen? Check all your GFCI receptacles to make sure they are operating properly, ie. trip them and reset them. You'll need to get yourself an inexpensive analog multimeter ($10 at box stores) so you can test each receptacle. The reason I ask the age, is because older houses, say before 1993 did not require the GFCI in a bathroom to be isolated for that room, and often allowed wiring to other rooms. Breakers in your panel may not appear to be tripped, but will need to be turned all the way off and back on again.

As well, can you tell us the reason this outage occurred? Was there a storm? Overload from a vacuum cleaner, etc? Tinkering accident?

 

Welcome to the forums.

A problem like this shows how important it is to identify NOW all the circuits in your house..... what's on what breaker.... so that when a problem like this occurs you are three steps ahead.

We would normally tell you to turn the circuit off and pull out and check the devices. In this case we can't tell you what circuit to shut off.

You can spend some time, and with the help of a friend or two, turn off one breaker at a time and identify the circuits. When you find a breaker that doesn't turn anything off (that you can see) leave it off and continue. When you're all done you should find at least one breaker that doesn't operate anything.

If not then it means that one of the circuits you previously turned off is part of the same circuit.

 

Right on! The house was built in the early 80s but has been built onto a couple of times I am guessing, hence the multiple locations for circuit breakers. One of the rooms that the wall is in has a bathroom in it but it is not shared with the same wall. I tried to reset the breakers but need to try the one at a time idea and find out what goes to what because I am afraid everything is labeled improperly. Will get back to yall when I get off work

Thanks so far!
JW